“The Squatter doesn’t talk to me. He talks to the Kuwaiti. And the Squatter thinks I’m a spy. Somebody told him I was American. Who the fuck do you think did that?”
“Don’t know. I’ll check.”
“Well check that fucking imam the Navy sent us.”
“Will do,” said Griffin, but his eyes weren’t focused on mine.
“It’s slow going,” I said. “And I’m not sure how much the Squatter knows about whatever is happening now. The ships were put in motion in November. Now it’s almost March. They’re making long, slow trips with lots of stops in little ports. The names of the ships change. The papers get shuffled. But the real cargo stays the same—just like you found near England and Japan, a whole lot of nitrates, and enough radioactive stuff from industrial sources to panic the country when the dust cloud settles and the Geiger counters go off. You haven’t caught the other ships yet ’cause they’re hanging back. The first ones you got were almost like trial runs. The next six are just waiting for the order.”
“When’s that coming? Who’s it coming from?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure anybody here knows. But I’ll tell you what they think. They think the man with the plan is inside the United States.”
Griffin looked at his watch. He looked into my eyes. “Yeah,” he said, nodding his head gently. “A sleeper,” he said.
“Maybe the sleeper,” I said. “The brains. The guy who blends in and nobody notices, and who runs the whole show. Or maybe it’s just some kind of story they made up in the Afghanistan camps.”
Griffin looked at me. Waiting.
And then the lights went out.
The little interrogation shed didn’t have any windows, so now we were in total darkness. The air conditioner stopped, too.
“Don’t move,” said Griffin. His voice echoed in the sudden silence. “The mikes and cameras are off as long as the power’s out. But the power will be back in a couple of minutes. Right now we can talk straight.”
I thought this might be some kind of show for me, a little psy-op to secure my trust. “So talk,” I said.
“There’s a war inside the government right now,” he said. “A war about the future of the war. That’s what I was trying to tell you when I saw you the last time.”
“What do you mean ‘war about the future of the war’?”
“You fight to win, right? That’s my business. That’s your business. You fight to win so you won’t have to fight anymore—at least not the same enemy. Ain’t that right?”
“Hell yes.”
“Well, some people don’t see things that way. They want the war to go on, and if this one ends, they want a new one.”
“That’s fucking crazy.”
“Yeah, but it’s a fact. I haven’t really figured out why. Power? Money? A message from God? They live in their own weird inside-the-Beltway universe. But the fact is, the war-makers in Washington think they’re going to cook up a whole new world. And to do that, they got to keep the fire burning.”
The blackness closed in around me. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because these assholes don’t seem to care about the bad guys—the real bad guys. We’re hunting them. We’re catching some. You got the biggest prize so far. But the war lobby doesn’t give a shit about Abu Zubayr. You know what I think? I think if we caught Osama himself they’d be rip-shit because that might end support for their war.”
“Go on.”
“So the ones who know about you—”
“You said nobody knew I was here.”
“Almost nobody. There ain’t many, but the ones who do are powerful, and some of them don’t want you out of here.”
“You mean they don’t want me hunting down the bad guys. Well I didn’t do it for them anyway. And if it helps, I won’t do it anymore. Send me home. I’ll stay there.”
“Kurt, listen, I am your friend. I got to tell you it’s going to be hard as hell to get you out of here.”
“Ah shit. Shit!”
“And there might be some big trouble on the way. They need some victories to keep up the appetite for war. They’re looking for sleepers inside the U.S.A., people they can point to as ‘the enemy within.’ ”
“There are sleepers, and they’re dangerous as hell.”
“But they can’t find them.”
“Okay, then I can find them.”
“You don’t understand. They can’t seem to find the real ones, or maybe they don’t want to—but they got to point the finger somewhere and fast. With your background, with some of the things you’ve done, I think they’re going to point the finger at you. If that happens, you’re going to be a public ‘captured American,’ some kind of ‘American Taliban.’ And you ain’t ever going to be free.”
There wasn’t anything I could say. Griffin only knew part of the story, and what he didn’t know—what I’d almost done—was far, far worse than he thought.
“Don’t give up,” said Griffin. “I’ve got a couple of ideas—things I set in motion. Let’s hope they work.”
“What?”
The lights went back on.
“This session is over,” said Griffin.
The door to one of the bedrooms on the second floor of the house by the pond was kind of special to me. I’d given it simple inset panels, and at the top I’d jigsawed three little hearts. I thought that if this was a little girl’s room, that would be a nice way to be able to check on her without crowding her too much. And I hoped that Miriam would like it when she saw it. But now the door wasn’t hung right. When I tried to swing it closed, it stuck against the jamb. I took it off its hinges, put the wedges back in and reset it. But still it wasn’t right. All that work. All that work! And still it wasn’t right.
The scream from the next cage made the whole house disappear. The floodlights were out, so it must have been between two and four in the morning, but there was still enough glow from the watchtowers to see the Squatter writhing naked on the cement floor of his cage, holding his gut like he was trying to squeeze out the fire inside. Spit was foaming at the corners of his mouth, and diarrhea spread underneath him. I backed away from his cage and sat down, watching, from the other side of mine. The Squatter groaned now, in too much pain to scream, and the body jackknifed on the ground, then unbent, violently folding and unfolding in a terrible convulsion.
“Poison.” The voice of the Sudanese was right next to my ear. “Must be poison.” He shook the wire of the cage. “Murderers!” he shouted. The floodlights went on and a guard platoon charged down the alley in front of the cages. “Murderers!” shouted the Sudanese, and others started to join in the chant. Suddenly the loudspeakers erupted with the call to fajr, the morning prayer: “God is Great. Prayer is better than sleep…” drowning the shouts of the prisoners. Four of the guards threw open the door to the Squatter’s cage and struggled to pin him down for the chains and shackles, but he writhed like a man possessed, the demon jinn more powerful than him or the men around him. The imam who had come to lead prayers now went inside the Squatter’s cage, pacing at the edge of the struggle between the guards and the twisting, buckling man on the ground like a referee at a tag-team wrestling match. “Get out!” one of the guards shouted at him, but the imam kept working his way around the ring, stepping past the spilled slop bucket and the sleeping mat. The Squatter always left the plastic wrappers from the food lying around inside the cage. Now the imam-referee bent down and picked up an empty pack of raisins, slipping the Sun-Maid into the pocket of his BDUs. If I hadn’t had my own ringside seat I wouldn’t have known what he was doing. “Poison,” I said so the Sudanese could hear. “They poisoned his food.”
“It is true, Qibla,” said the Sudanese. “Poison for talking.”
“Talking?”
“Talking too much, talking too little,” said the Sudanese. “Talking gets you killed.”
There won’t be any explanation, I thought. They’ll take the Squatter away and he’ll just be gone, maybe dead, maybe in a ho
spital, maybe in a cage on the other side of the camp, maybe in some hole for hard questioning. Nobody here would know. Did the imam poison him to shut him up? I looked at the Kuwaiti, who seemed, for once, to be completely speechless. The chains were on the Squatter now, and the gurney had arrived so he could be strapped down. No, we weren’t going to know, and I wasn’t going to learn anything more from the Squatter, not now, and not ever.
Soon after the sun came up full, the imam came back. He looked around the floor of the cage. There was nothing left but the spilled buckets, the worn foam pad, the filthy towels piled in a corner, junk-food trash, and the smeared pool of liquid shit. The imam was looking for something in particular. He bent down and picked up one raisin, then another, but he was still looking. Like someone in a silent movie saying “Aha!” he picked up a towel by its corner and shook out of it the Qur’an. Everybody who could see him was watching him as he wiped it off with his hand, held it to his chest, and left.
“Attention,” barked a man’s voice on the loudspeaker. “Collect your belongings. Today cells will be changed. Repeat: collect belongings. You will be taken out of your present cells and you will not be returned to them.”
None of us had any belongings, but every fifteen minutes the message repeated until, slowly, some of the detainees rolled up their bedrolls and tied them with the towels. Others embraced their Qur’ans. Most, like me, did nothing. Just before noon, the transfers began, as one by one the prisoners were taken out of the cages, chained, and shuffled onto the buses that had brought us from the airport so many weeks before. They came for me about four in the afternoon. I was one of the last to be taken away. Eight or nine other prisoners and about the same number of guards were already on the bus. None were men I’d ever seen before.
They took us in full restraints to a large hangar near the airstrip that had been divided into crude plywood cubicles. Each of us was put in a separate box. I heard the doors closing on some, doors opening on the others. Some of the detainees shouted and complained. I didn’t. I was still working on the heart-door of Miriam’s room in my house by the pond.
Later, maybe a few hours later, the plywood entrance to the cubicle I was in swung open and two guards came for me. We shuffled out into the open and I saw it was night. Even with the runway lights around me I could see the sky was full of stars, and realized with a flash of pain how long it had been since I had seen a full nighttime horizon. We shuffled out onto the tarmac, and I looked around to see where the bus was. I was tired. I didn’t want to have to shuffle too much farther in these fucking chains. But we stopped beside one of two executive jets parked on the apron.
One of the guards unlocked the chains on my feet and pulled them off. “Up,” he said.
“What the fuck’s going on?”
“Up,” was all he said.
I stumbled up the steps into the unlit cabin and saw Griffin alone at the back, looking out the little round window at the guards below. “That’s it,” he shouted. The guard stepped back down. The stairs immediately rose up into the side of the fuselage. The lights went on. “Come here and let me take off the cuffs,” said Griffin, holding up the key.
“What the hell’s happening?”
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
“You’re going home, Kurt.”
“Don’t fuck with me.”
“I ain’t fucking with you.”
“You said it was going to be just about impossible.”
“Yeah. Unless somebody called the President.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, somebody did.”
Kansas
April–June 2002
Chapter 26
“The President of the United States? What the hell are you talking about?”
Griffin was facing me in the narrow cabin of the plane, but if he reacted I couldn’t tell. The only light was from the thin, dim thread that ran along the floor and the stroboscopic flash from the wingtips.
“Who called the President?” I asked again.
“Can’t say. A friend of yours, I guess.”
“I don’t have any friends like that.”
“Yeah, you don’t have friends, do you? But it looks like you have an angel.”
“Nobody knew where I was, unless you told them.”
“Let’s not go there,” said Griffin. “Let’s not worry about how you got out. Let’s worry about keeping you out. And having you ready to move if we need you again.”
I remembered the magazine in Kenya with the picture of the old Bush and the Aga Khan. I remembered those long nights with Cathleen, and the way she talked about her boss’s friends in high places. “Faridoon,” I said. “Faridoon got me out of the cage.”
“Don’t go there. Don’t go back over any of this,” said Griffin. “Don’t talk about Guantánamo. Because damn it, you never were there.”
“Yeah. Five months of never was. But you called Faridoon.”
“Someday I’ll tell you the whole story. But not tonight.” Griffin turned his shadowy head to look out the window.
I slept, woke with a start, slept.
“That’s the Mississippi down there,” said Griffin. A couple of lit-up ships moved on its night-black water. We seemed to be following it upstream. “The Big Muddy,” said Griffin.
I knew then that we really were on our way home. “The Big Muddy,” I remember saying, and that was all. I fell into a sleep so deep I didn’t wake up again until we were rolling to a stop on the runway apron.
“Kurt.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re almost home.”
The lights went on in the cabin and I blinked awake. “What?”
“Almost home. We’re at McConnell.”
“Good. Good God. Yeah!”
“And there’s some folks here I think you want to see.”
Both of them were standing in front of a big old Suburban—standing out in the headlights looking as bright as a USO show. I waved through the tiny window of the jet and Betsy said something to Miriam, picking her up and pointing. But Miriam looked around, a little lost, not seeing any face she knew.
The jet’s stairs went down and Griffin put his hand under my arm like I needed help, which, to my surprise, I did. “I got it, I got it,” I said, hunching over as I made my way out the cabin door. The air smelled like black fields fresh-turned. We must have been at the edge of the base, because it was all farm smells, earth and straw, and nothing ever smelled better to me in my life. And then Betsy ran toward me with Miriam. I took my child in my arms, and Betsy, too, all in one long hug that I wouldn’t and couldn’t stop, breathing them in, smelling Betsy’s neck and hair—the perfume from the bottle with the crystal doves. And I guess I pulled back for a second because of the weird memory from the deck of the carrier. Betsy looked at me, then looked at me again real serious. “Is that you, Kurt, behind that beard?” Miriam was wiping the kisses off her face, and looked a little scared.
“Oh, Baby,” I said. “I can’t believe it’s me either, and you, and Miriam. Come on, Miriam, give me an Eskimo kiss.” She pulled back. “I can’t—can’t believe—oh, God, Baby let’s go. Let’s just get the hell out of here and go home.”
“We have to stay in a motel tonight.”
“If we’re together,” I said, “then that’s home.”
“We’ve got so much to talk about,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess we do.”
We didn’t make love that night at the Ramada. Miriam was in the bed on Betsy’s side, and restless in her sleep, but that wasn’t the only reason why. We didn’t fight, but that was closer to what happened in the long silences between us.
“Tell me what it was like for you all this time,” I asked.
“Lonely,” said Betsy. “About as lonely as a person can be. That’s how it was.”
“But Griffin took care of you.”
“Was it Griffin? Somebody made sure we had a place to stay and something to eat and a little
TV to watch. We were in Arlington, Virginia. But we might as well have been in prison. No friends. No work. No phone calls allowed unsupervised. God Almighty, Kurt. You go away and Miriam and I wind up hundreds of miles from home under some kind of house arrest, and to this day I have no damn idea what the hell you were doing or why.”
“I want to tell you, but if I start, Baby, I won’t stop. And I can’t do that.”
“Just tell me one thing then,” said Betsy, and right then Miriam let out a long half-cry from deep in a nightmare. “Just tell me one thing,” Betsy whispered again. “Did you save the world?”
“I stopped a few bad guys,” I said.
We were lying side by side and I could feel the warmth from her body, but something like a force field kept us apart. Every so often a car would pull through the parking lot outside and send a beam through a crack in the curtains sweeping like a searchlight across the stucco on the ceiling. The little red standby light on the TV glared like a snake’s eye. I tried to think of the house on the hill by the pond. But it wouldn’t come together. It was just an idea now, not a place to be.
I thought of Guantánamo. I thought of the padded cell in the hold of the ship. I thought of the desert and the mud and the beehives, and of Nureddin moving through the night, and of Cathleen and her bottle of mother’s milk, and Faridoon and the Ismailis and their friends, maybe some of them in the White House. And I wondered how I could have been so many places and done so many things that I couldn’t begin to talk about with the woman I loved. I saw Waris in her father’s arms and smelled again the smell of death that was around her in the hospital. I saw the video arcade in Granada, and felt the cold water rush over my half broken body on the floor of the bodega. I drove the blade into Abu Seif’s bull-neck—
“What is it?” said Betsy.
“Nothing,” I said. “A bad dream I guess.”
The tape in my head kept rewinding, the images skipping by, each worse than the next, until I saw the people on the videotape in Granada, the woman I killed and the half-seen face of Al-Shami, whoever the hell he was. Al-Shami was in Granada. I was pretty sure he was in Somalia, too. Now he was with me in my sleep. He was every fucking place I turned.
The Sleeper Page 16
